How to protect an XSLT stylesheet from edit/copy

[iBall]

I created an XSLT stylesheet that I'd like to share with coworkers, but there's a fear of a coworker sharing it with a competitor.

Is there any way to protect it from being copied/moved/edited?

Or perhaps is there a way to use a cloud based solution and allow oxygen to access the stylesheet via the internet as an additional stylesheet?

[Costin]

Hello,

Unfortunately, you can not control the access to a file from within oXygen application.
Therefore, you can not restrict the document from being copied or moved.

What can be done though, outside the application, is to right click your document and go to "Properties".
Once there, you can flag your document as being "read only" and apply the changes.
Going further, there is an option in oXygen called "Can edit read only files", accessible from menu Options > Preferences > Editor. If this option is enabled, the document can be edited but may not be saved.
If you uncheck the above mentioned option, the document could not edit nor save the read-only files.

Even if going this way the editing of the document would not be possible, this would still not restrict other colleagues to copy or move the file.

Let us know when you need other information.

Best Regards,
Costin

[iBall]

Thanks for the reply Costin.

How about storing the file in a remote location (ie such as a cloud based storage service) and allowing people to access for transformations? I'm thinking they could take the link to the file and paste it into "transformation scenario" URL; is that possible?

If so, do you recommend any cloud storage services that would allow me to do this?

Thanks again.

[adrian]

Hello,

While it's possible to store the file in a remote location (cloud or otherwise) and use the URL of that file in a transformation scenario from Oxygen, you still have not resolved the problem of protecting the file from being copied. You now have a URL pointing to the file instead of a local copy of the file, but the user can just as well use File > Open URL and paste there the URL of the file to open it and save/copy it locally, if that's what he/she wants. Even if there's authentication to access the resource, Oxygen caches the credentials within a session, so after running the transformation (which would need to have access to the resource), the user will also have access to that resource in that session via Open URL.

Anyway, my point is, if you allow read access to a file so that the transformation can be applied, you also allow read access to the file for the user to copy it (if the user is aware if it).
What you need is an abstraction layer (hide the implementation) so that the user does not have direct access to (or even have knowledge of the existence of) the file. Oxygen does not provide this in the user interface. One way you could do this for Oxygen would be to develop a plugin (Java) that does what you need (apply the transformation), without letting the user know what file (if any) it uses and from where.

Regards,
Adrian

[iBall]

So using the Oxygen SDK, I can create a plugin for the Oxygen XML editor, that does the final transformation without the user knowing where/how it was done? I'd love to get started on it. If this is the case, do you recommend any plugin extensions I could use? And can the plugin truly mask the XSL code so no one can get to it?

Thanks again

[Radu]

Hi,

I answered you here:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/forum/post34219.html

Regards,
Radu